


A Fool to His Folly

by athena_crikey



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Background Filler, Creepsville, Gen, Inanimate Personas, The Folly is a person too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-16 23:40:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5845423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athena_crikey/pseuds/athena_crikey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Folly was more than one man; it had to be. If it wasn’t, it would crumble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Fool to His Folly

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Proverbs 26:11.

The Folly’s roots ran deep. Far deeper than the Georgian terrace house’s brick and mortar, than the worn stone of the front steps. Since there had been human magic in Britain there had been a Folly, stretching back long before Newton brought order from the kingdom’s many voices. The most loyal and steadfast of men had since the mists of time banded together to protect the purity of their art from those who used magic for their own ends alone – or those who sought to forbid its use. 

There were Knights Templar in its past, sheriffs and magistrates, earls and barons and even a few princes. There were soldiers and sailors and huntsmen all – a wealth of wizards striving to protect the best of British magic. In its time it had been a fort, a castle, a stately manor home.

Build, loved, protected over the centuries by such men, it was only natural that as the years ground on the Folly came to take some of their magic into itself. Built a life of its own, a burning, unforgiving kind of expectation: Spend your strength, your life, your soul for me, and spare no man who perverts our flame. 

In the time when the building had been inhabited by the greatest lights of the wizarding community, the Folly’s whispers had been nearly drowned out by the bustle of life – a hundred wizards feeding a tiny soul’s quiet murmurings, appeasing its yearnings.

That had been the way of things, until Ettersburg.

Now the Folly was empty. The house was all shadows and barren rooms, smelling of cold brick and regret, and the whispers sunk like hooks into the sole remaining wizard to uphold its name. 

Nightingale haunted the Folly like a revenant, and its ancient voice was the only one he heard ringing in its halls. 

\---------------------------------------------------------------

Nightingale had come back from the war a shade of the man he had been on his departure. They called him lucky, some with less wit than kind intentions said he had been destined to return to Berkley Square, at least. He spent months in hospital upon his return to Britain, the physical act of mending taking far less time than the mental. 

It was late autumn by the time he came to the Folly, stood at its gate like Cunning Odysseus returned from his journeys without a single one of his sailors. The doors opened for him on silent hinges to reveal the darkened mosaic of dizzying knots and braids beyond. 

He had once thought he had the pattern memorized; would be able to sketch it without thought anywhere. Four years of war had burnt those memories, and standing here in the silence he found that the ashes choked him.

There were no lights, no crowd, no fanfare. The letters he had received in hospital had prepared him for that: for the flight of his colleagues and friends. For a moment in the coldness he felt something like loneliness, but it was probably just his own heart. 

The only person remaining was a young woman very unlike Penelope, standing in the lee of the western staircase. She was still wearing the same uniform, mob cap and monochrome skirt and blouse.

“It looks as if I’m back,” he said, and saw the tears in her eyes. Once, he would have wiped them away. Now, he only dropped his kit and sat down heavily in the centre of the mosaic. The uniform he had been provided rucked up uncomfortably against him, stiff with starch and ironing. After a while he felt the soft warmth of Molly’s shoulder against his side. 

They stayed like that for a long time.

\-----------------------------------------------------

The _vestigia_ caught him at the most unexpected times, each one like a blow to the gut. Turning the pages of a book he caught the scent of a pipe and the drowsy sensation of lazy afternoons in a sunny schoolroom. In the lounge he heard the clinking of sherry glasses and the sound of many voices laughing a warm contagious laughter. In the room next to his there was the crinkle of paper and the smell of pencil shavings and boot polish, partnered with a nervous anxiety. 

In the basement by the third library – he wouldn’t give it its true name, not still in the shadow of Ettersburg – he smelled gunpowder and steel, heard the screams of dozens of voices.

But still, there were other sensations. Not _vestigia_ although similar, these were more diffuse, harder to sense. Like a voice heard from too far away, they conveyed tone but no meaning. Regret, sorrow, fear, yearning, _need_. 

Nightingale told Molly to leave the corridor to the third library alone; he had never heard the whispers before the cursed material had been brought over the Folly’s threshold. Perhaps, somehow, they had contaminated this place which they had already decimated. 

But as the weeks dragged into months, he found he didn’t believe it. Or perhaps just couldn’t. Not if he were to stay here and keep his sanity. 

\-----------------------------------------------------

He heard it first in a dream. It had been, like most of his dreams these days, a nightmare at the beginning. But the smell of smoke and rent flesh disappeared slowly to be replaced only with a cool greyness – smooth like polished wood underfoot, unseen walls with the roughness of naked brick. 

_Stay. Stay here._

The voice was weak, soft. Just a breath of air, a chorus of soft voices neither masculine or feminine. He looked around. “Where?”

_Here. Here. Here._

“I don’t know what you mean.”

_Stay for me/us/this._ The voices tangled together, their words complimentary but distinct.

Nightingale woke in a sweat, side aching from the long-healed gunshot, and felt a fading sense of desperation. 

He didn’t sleep again that night.

\-------------------------------------------------------

He had similar dreams off and on for several weeks, but as with all things familiarity begat contempt and he stopped worrying about the distant voices. 

Nightingale had thought that running the Folly on his own would be an impossible task, but post-war London was a different city. The years of bombing had obliterated much of the occult history, destroying churches, graveyards, ancient houses and practitioners with an even hand. More, many more, of those likely to offend had died in service. And somehow, when those who returned found themselves back home after years of hardship and death’s constant companionship, the last thing they seemed eager to do was risk losing that freedom by re-offence. 

With cases plummeting, Nightingale had Molly pack an overnight case and arranged a trip to Buckinghamshire to see his mother and sister. 

As he put his hand on the front door’s handle, he felt a wave of dread and grasping, white-knuckled anxiety come over him. 

A breath tickled the back of his neck, the toneless whisper of several voices: _Stay._

Nightingale whipped around; Molly was standing in the doorway to the back stairs, watching him curiously. “Did you hear that?” he demanded. She shook her head slowly, a frown coming to her lips. “Never mind.” 

He grasped the handle firmly, pushed the door open, and left. 

\------------------------------------------------------

After that, it started happening more frequently. Whispers when he came into a room, walking down the hall, but most often when he left the Folly on business or just to breathe the outside air. _Stay for me. Don’t leave. Stay here/now/always._

He began reading up on revenants, but the Folly was protected by ages of wardings; there was no way it could be haunted. Besides, few wizards in the service of their country died in their beds. And they certainly weren’t buried on the Folly grounds. He conducted several rituals to be certain, Molly standing by with water to douse flames and a large iron knife with a bone handle just in case. Unsurprisingly, they revealed nothing. 

It wasn’t until he was standing in the front hall staring down at the twisting pattern of the mosaic and the voices whispered, right behind him, _Here, with me, always_ , that he realised he knew. Knew who this was, and what it wanted of him.

The Folly had no desire to be abandoned to rot. It was a feeling he could understand.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, tiredly. Then he turned, opened the door, and walked out into the sunlight. For the first time, the message changed. 

_Good._

\-----------------------------------------------------

For the first several years, he believed the war truly had caused a reduction in magic-related crimes. After five years of decline, however, he started to realise a larger, more frightening truth: Magic-related crimes were decreasing as the magic leaked out of the world. Those with a more scientific bent said it was due to the cataclysmic force used at the Ettersburg, others tending more towards religion argued the barbaric use of magic in that place had caused this reckoning. Either way, the facts were unassailable: magic was fading away into the mists of time. Theirs would be the last generation of wizards, so help them all. 

_No_ , whispered the Folly late at night, moonlight painting the study carpet a pale blue. _Not like this_. Nightingale leaned into the comforting leather of the wing-backed chair and let his eyes slowly slide closed. 

\-----------------------------------------------------

Molly grew steadily more distant as he became used to the business of running the Folly. He was no longer a carefree sergeant who could indulge his desires in his free time, nor a wounded captain who needed care and tending. He was becoming an old man, and he was growing used to being alone. They said nothing to each other; they just drifted a ways apart from one another, trapped in their own silent worlds.

“I wonder sometimes,” mused Nightingale to himself, staring down at the plate of stewed beef, potatoes, carrots, Brussel sprouts, and mustard. 

_Do you._ It wasn’t a question. _You have all you want/need/covet._

Perhaps it was true. He sighed and carved up another potato in a doomed attempt to clear his plate. 

\----------------------------------------------------

His mother passed away one spring after a short, sharp decline. He and his sister buried her, the only two left of a once-thriving family. 

Now an orphan he began to feel retirement drawing nearer, the future’s mists clearing enough for him to see a house in the country, peace and quiet, a cat to feed saucers of milk to on the doorstep. A tabby, he thought, or perhaps a tortoise shell. 

1965 came in and Eliot departed the world not with a bang but a whimper. Nightingale began packing up his things, and found that despite the memories and the devotion of a lifetime, he was looking forward to his retirement with as much relief as dread. 

Relief to no longer walk the empty halls, come upon _vestigia_ sudden as tripwires, despatch evil after evil with no one for friendship or support. 

Relief to no longer by the sole practicing Newtonian in England. 

Or at least, he would have been relieved, had he not been kept awake at night by the Folly’s restless fears. Cold and slimy as willow roots burrowing into underground streams they bored into him, creeping into his brain at night while he slept, poisoning his thoughts. Turning its fears into his fears, or trying to. 

“I will leave,” he said one night, staring at his fire and feeling the anxiety heavy as lead weights on his shoulders. “I will go, and that will be the end of it.”

_Do not. You are life/light/strength/might. Do not go._

“I am an old man, tired and frail. I’m no longer what you want me to be. Let me go.”

_No._

The single word whipped through the room, hard and discordant; Nightingale shivered. But after that there was no more, and eventually he lay down and went to sleep. 

\-----------------------------------------------

It was the aches from the old wounds he noticed first – or rather, their absence. His knee no longer twinged on cold, damp mornings. He no longer felt a stiffness in his shoulder where a scrap of mortar had hit him, nearly thirty years ago now. 

His energy began to return slowly, leaving him feeling healthy and able after ascending a couple of flights of stairs rather than puffy and trembling. He began going for walks again, started to take joy in that exercise. 

“I’ve been feeling better lately,” he told Molly; she canted her head to the side assessingly, eyes sweeping over him. “I may stay a little longer. Just to keep things in order.”

She smiled – an expression of genuine pleasure, and he felt a stab of guilt. Sooner or later he would have to leave her; even if he took her with him he would eventually wither and die, and again she would be alone. But no good came from deriving guilt from entropy, and he forced himself to move on. 

That is at least until he began to notice his youth returning in the mirror. It happened slowly, the loose skin under his jaw tightening; the wrinkles on his forehead and hands smoothing. But it undid itself as inexorably as it had come, month by month. His hair began to darken, his hands growing steadier. And all the while he felt his strength returning, his stamina and speed with it. 

He delayed his retirement again and again, six months, a year, two years. Until it became clear that he wasn’t simply catching some second wind. He was regaining his youth, as impossible as it sounded. 

Nightingale returned to the Folly from indefinitely rescinding his retirement with the Commissioner, not altogether glad. A second youth was one thing, perhaps; another lifetime at the Folly…

“It’s you, isn’t it?” he asked the empty hall. “This youth, this second chance.”

_You won’t leave._

“Not now,” he allowed, temporizing. 

_You won’t,_ it repeated, whispers drawn out as the voices wrapped themselves around him, close as a shroud. He closed his eyes, hands tightening into fists, and said nothing. 

\--------------------------------------------------------

Nightingale found, as he regained his youth, that much as he had hated growing old he had still forgotten what it was to be young. The joy of not having to watch what he ate, or restrict activity, or lay awake half the night. The simple knowledge that he could chase any man that ran from him, and stand a good chance of catching him. 

_Your strength is my strength,_ the Folly told him, its satisfaction worming deep down into him. 

“For a while.”

\------------------------------------------------------

The magic was coming back. He could feel it in the city, a slow steady trickle, faint but undeniably there. _Vestigia_ grew stronger, and the fae began re-emerging from the twilight into which they’d been fading.

Magic was simply a current, however, and without a conduit it meant little. The wizards were dying, and no new practitioners had been trained to fill their footsteps. 

Nightingale spent most of his days nesting in the Folly, buried in old treatises and texts, the tips of his fingers becoming cracked and dry. The outside world, all neon light and coloured screens and screeching foreign cars, began to pass him by. 

_You will always be safe here. Warm/treasured/comforted. There is nothing else._ The words soaked into him like honey, thick, languid and just faintly cloying.

“There is,” protested Nightingale. But he didn’t name it, and in the dusty silence of the library he felt a curl of self-satisfaction that he nearly mistook for his own.

\-----------------------------------------------------------

When he was ninety-one – and looked for all the world fifty years younger – Nightingale was thrown tail over tea kettle into a brick wall by a clay man, breaking four ribs and cracking two more along with his skull. 

The first person he met upon waking was the nurse, Jodie. The second was Dr Abdul Haqq Walid, gastroenterologist. The broken ribs had punctured his bowel, and the thoracic surgeon had called him in on a consultation. 

The drugs were making Nightingale very muzzy, and simultaneously loquacious – a dangerous combination.

“I never imagined meeting a gastro – gastroent’ro – you,” he said, looking dizzily up at the young physician who seemed to tower over him. Despite his name he had a ruddy complexion and ginger hair – a source of confusion to Nightingale’s drugged and concussed brain.

“I never imagined meeting a wizard,” replied Walid, his tone pleasant. He had a soft highland brogue. “Or is that not the right term? Your colleagues didn’t elaborate.”

Nightingale frowned at the world _colleagues_ until he realised Walid meant the police. “Perfectly. Although my colleagues prefer ‘that bastard,’” he finished, with shocking candidness. He rolled his head backwards; God, but he was high. “I suppose you think me mad,” he continued, unable to stop himself. It was as though the filter between his brain and mouth had absented itself from the scene. 

“Oh, it’s nae the first I’ve heard of you,” said the doctor, cheerily. “You’re known to the local pathologists. Some of your work sounds fascinating.”

“Nine tenths tedium, one tenth delirium,” said Nightingale, corrupting Einstein shamelessly. “Very little bowel disease, though.” 

“You’ll find, Inspector, when I develop an interest it doesn’t much matter what stands in my way. Picking up a grounding in pathology isn’t a barrier. Or whatever the equivalent of your field would be, medically. I want to know more.”

Nightingale started picking at the tape on the back of his hand holding the IV in place, and Walid rapped his knuckles lightly; he desisted. “There isn’t a medical equivalent of my work, doctor,” he said, curling down under the blankets. His head hurt, his ribs hurt, the long line of the incision burned. 

He found, very suddenly, that he wanted to be home. Intensely, _desperately_ wanted to be back. Needed to be – back where he was safe, warm, comfortable. 

“Then I’ll have to make one,” asserted Walid, calmly. Nightingale, feeling himself slipping away into the blackness of unconsciousness, fought against the anxiety welling up in him at being locked away from the Folly – being trapped here.

“I’ll help you,” he promised, brashly. “Tell you what you want. Just get me out of here.”

“You’re still in recovery – it will be days before…”

Nightingale shook his head, hands grasping at the edges of his blankets at the sudden rush of pain and nausea the movement caused. “Now – when I wake. I need… to be there.”

The world twisted suddenly, lights bleeding into shadows, and then darkness took him. 

\--------------------------------------------------

Walid managed it, somehow. A visiting nurse was arranged, and daily check-ins with the doctor himself. A bedroom with IVs and a desk full of syringes and medications and bandages; Molly in a fitted mask cleaning and sterilizing irrepressibly. 

Slowly, as he healed, Nightingale caught Walid up on the fundamentals – Newtonian magic, hedge magic, fae magic, and the beings that occupied the uncharted space between all three. The effects of magic on life, and the influences it had over death. Walid soaked knowledge in like a sponge, and his interest in experimentation was if not contagious then at least something Nightingale could respect. 

_He is no wizard_ , muttered the voices, rebelliously, almost petulantly. 

“He is a friend,” remonstrated Nightingale softly from his sick-bed, eyes half-closed with pain and exhaustion. “A valuable one.”

_Friendship? It is not loyalty/love/protection._

“It can be all three. You have seen that.”

_It is not me._

“No,” agreed Nightingale. “It isn’t you. But it seems I can no more quit you, for all that.”

\-----------------------------------------------------

It was a long time before Nightingale left the Folly again. Even when his posture and gait had returned to their former grace he lingered in the dark halls, warmed by the quiet regard he found there. Walid didn’t understand; Molly didn’t protest. 

Standing on the Folly’s stoop looking out at the rain-soaked square, Nightingale wondered when he had lost his freedom.

\-------------------------------------------------------

It was a case that brought him out, a pack of werewolves running by the river upsetting Mama Thames’ girls. He called up the Paras and arranged for some firepower, then picked up his hat and stick. 

Leaving the Folly was nearly the hardest thing he had ever done; far harder than leaving in 1940 had been. He could feel its insubstantial tendrils catching at him, pulling him back. 

_Stay. Don’t leave. Be mine/I’m yours/We are whole._

“I am more than this. You are more than this. _Wizardry_ is more than this,” he choked out, and stumbled down the stairs. Each step he took away became easier, but he felt the burden still in his heart, heavy and razor-edged. 

The Folly was more than one man; it had to be. If it wasn’t, it would crumble. And, with the way he felt, that reckoning would come sooner than later.

\------------------------------------------------------

Still, he kept on. On and on and on as the years turned, and everyone except him grew older. He stayed, trapped unchanged in the Folly’s tiny snow globe world, pristine and perfect. 

Stayed, until a gruesome murder in Covent Gardens sent him patrolling the damp cobbles when the streets were nearer to silent, feeling for _vestigia_.

He met a young man in a PC’s uniform on the corner there. PC Peter Grant from Charing Cross nick. Peter Grant, who was looking for a ghost. Nightingale considered him for a moment, then left him alone to get on with it. 

He only made it a block before the laughter started – a light, relieved, _delirious_ laughter. 

There was another magic-user in London. Another wizard – and if not him, then perhaps another like him. 

Perhaps, just perhaps, he and the Folly would not together end the legacy of British wizardry – and each other.


End file.
